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About astag_rocky

For the countless number of you who have been anxiously awaiting the arrival of next year’s course catalog – your wait is over. Wesleyan’s course catalog for the 2016-2017 academic year has been made public via the website which you all love, or love to hate, WesMaps.

Though, like every year, it might be hard to actually plan your schedule at this point, especially if you are hoping to take any of the many classes whose time-slots are simply listed as TBA. Additionally, even for those classes that have been scheduled, there still exists a possibility for change. But there are also classes which will certainly be added later, some of which might be taught by visiting professors. More importantly, there really is a class called Hipsters that is being taught this year by Professor KehaulaniKauanui (AMST 240)!!!!! Eat your heart out and have fun browsing.

While most of us can’t say that our claim to fame is beating Steve Wozniak at something, Rutherford Chang ’02 has achieved this distinction. As a Guardian article last month reported, he’s the second best Tetris player in the world – four places ahead of Wozniak with a high score of 614,094.

But Chang doesn’t play Tetris for mere procrastinating pleasure; as a visual and performance artist, he views the strategy of Tetris as mirroring the corporate workplace where repetition and competition dominate (as he told The Guardian): “Every 10 lines you complete, you advance one level and the pieces fall faster,” he says. “Eventually they fall so fast that you can’t keep up and you die… You can’t ever beat the game. It’s about squeezing in as much perfection as possible in this limited time before your inevitable death.”

If his Tetris skills and creative capitalist critique weren’t enough, Chang made news back in 2013 as the primary collector of first pressings of The Beatles’s The White Album. His installation “We Buy White Albums” displayed 100 of the staggering 1,394 copies he now owns. I decided I’d have to investigate Chang’s awesomeness further so I hit him up for a quick chat about Tetris, The White Album, and his art. Hit the jump for our interview on all things Rutherford.

Prominent Korean digital artists Youngho Kim and Jisong Lee examine
the “beauty of movement in silence” through photography and video in
their first exhibition outside Korea. Both artists build on their long
careers in fashion and commercial work to create works that examine
the core principals hiding behind what we see, and provide an opening
to re-explore, in a contemporary light, the topic of whether the world
that we are living in is a dream.

Do you want free food?! Well, the Class Council of 2019 is making you some free cookies and cupcakes! Stop by Bennet Hall tomorrow night from 8PM-11PM to decorate your own baked goods or enjoy some hot chocolate. Hope you all can make it! First come, first serve.

Some people watch TV or Netflix or random Youtube clips for the instant gratification that these forms of procrastination provide. You get to be brain dead for a couple of minutes or hours, almost hypnotically transported from the sweaty, nightmarish, hell-scape of your work (maybe that’s just me). The pure pleasure that you get is almost unmatched. This is the way I feel when I watch Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert go on various Fox News programs (usually it’s Bill O’Reilly).

Take this video of Stephen Colbert entering the No-Spin Zone (lol) for the first time in 2007. While Jon Stewart actually attempts to engage O’Reilly in serious conversation, it’s almost comical the lack of fucks Stephen Colbert gives about this interview. It’s a serious drought of fucks. It’s a situation so devoid of fucks, it almost makes you nervous for Bill O’Reilly, who definitely gives a fuck, and does not quite understand how to act in a situation where very little fucks are required for entry.

The Argus is seeking 1-2 students to take on the role of Distribution Manager for next semester.

The job pays $12.50 an hour (to cover for gas) and entails
distributing the paper to various locations on campus every Tuesday and Friday afternoon, usually between noon and 2 p.m. In order to do this job, you must have access to a car.

If you’re interested or have questions, please contact rebrill[at]wesleyan[dot]edu or tdmorgan[at]wesleyan[dot]edu.

Insomnia Cookies is the greatest thing to happen in the 21st century hands down. For the past two years, I’ve heard bougie students complain: “Why don’t we have a Chipotle near campus? Where is the Starbucks? Why can’t I have freshly baked cookies delivered to my door when I’ve high out of my mind at 2 am on a Saturday night and I’m halfway through a documentary about Scientology?”

Have no fear Wesleyan community. The Drunken Goods is here to answer your prayers. For more info on how to get your late night fixing, hit the jump.

Spring 2016 Pre-registration is open, meaning it’s 2+ weeks of fretting—mostly for frosh, but it’s no treat for everyone else, either. WesMaps takes in your feelings, your worries, your hopes, your dreams, your prerequisites, and it spits them out into a nonsensical schedule as if to say, I am a roulette of chance and class hierarchy, and you shall bow to my authority.

So to help everyone out in their quest, I’ve been going around looking for the weirdest/most liberal arts/funniest course names and descriptions on WesMaps. Just remember, just because it sounds stupid doesn’t mean it’s not the most awesome and fascinating class you might ever take.

The Committee for Investor Responsibility is hosting a panel open to all Wesleyan community members that will address the University’s endowment. Panelists will discuss how ethical considerations factor into investment decisions and choosing external managers.

President Roth will introduce the event and discuss the role of Wesleyan’s endowment in supporting academic programs and financial aid. The panel will feature Anne Martin, Wesleyan’s Chief Investment Officer, alongside Gil Skillman, Wesleyan Professor of Economics, and Noah Markman ’13, a Wesleyan alum who now works in the area of responsible investing. After presentations by the panelists, the space will be opened for questions from the audience.

It’s happened to the best of us. Read after the jump for some thoughts on the point system, harsh RAs and freshman innocence/stupidity.

The First Time I Got Written Up (astag_rocky)

For some reason, the basic freshman inside me loved the idea of bar night. Maybe it was the same way I felt about lanyards, until the second day of school when I realized how much you sucked if you left one waywardly dangling from your (most likely) beige khaki pants. Bar night represented a distinct difference between high school and college: the reprieve from the ills of the working week and the promise of doing some debaucherous shit on a Wednesday night. For sure, the Corner Pocket was no Vines on Church. In fact, it couldn’t have been in a more remote and random location in Middletown. But, you had to get some satisfaction knowing that if it weren’t for Wesleyan, The Corner Pocket probably would not exist (and I assume will soon file for bankruptcy now that Vines is open). One night, my freshman-self decided not to shut my turn-up off once I headed back to Clark, and I strode triumphantly out of the fourth floor elevator ready to conquer whatever was in my path.